Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday September 04, 2009 @10:46AM
from the open-standards-rule dept.

stelt writes "On Oct.2–4 Google will host the international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics at its campus in Mountain View, California. The SVG Open conference schedule shows developers and designers of various backgrounds. Major brands, open source projects, universities, and individuals are presenting on a variety of subjects like interactive scientific visualizations, mobile web animation art, internationalization and localization in print, geo-systems, etc. A couple of weeks back we discussed Google's adding SVG support to IE, and details of this project will be presented during the keynote 'SVG in Internet Explorer and at Google.'" Early-bird registration has already ended for this conference, but the pricing is not steep.

It's been somewhat amazing to me that an open standard for any kind of scalable vector graphics model on the web has taken so long to take off. The web has mostly been a graphical environment with bandwidth constraints. It seems a natural. I suspect a conspiracy.

It's been somewhat amazing to me that an open standard for any kind of scalable vector graphics model on the web has taken so long to take off. The web has mostly been a graphical environment with bandwidth constraints. It seems a natural. I suspect a conspiracy.

SVG has been around for quite sometime. The first specifications were released in 2001, Every major browser except IE supports SVG out of the box. The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

The concept of vector-based graphics wasn't so big in the early days of the Web mostly because computers, consumer desktops especially, were underpowered for display lots of complex vector graphics very quickly, as anyone who was using Corel Draw or even Illustrator in the early 90s can certainly attest to.

Nowadays, though PCs have plenty of horsepower to draw vector graphics quickly, so long you keep the number of nodes down.:)

IE 7+ use VML [wikipedia.org] which is almost identical in it's abilities to SVG. It's not trivial to write a content engine that gives SVG over VML for whatever browser that requires it, but it can be done with a bit of effort. It'd just be nice if MS played vall

Yeah, that's a fairly common compatibility workaround, and it's fortunately encapsulated in a number of libraries (e.g. this one [raphaeljs.com]), so the individual developer can often avoid having to know about SVGVML mapping issues.

The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

Microsoft was one of the original working partners of the SVG specification. They were in a position to support it at the outset, and even published an article about SVG [microsoft.com] in their premiere magazine. I remember going to a Microsoft conference back around 2000 and, when asked about the long-term viability of ActiveX, the Microsoft reps (who w

That's an incredibly disingenuous statement. If you want to be accurate, you should say that "Every major browser except IE supports various subsets of SVG out of the box."

Looking at the SVG browser support page [wikipedia.org], there is no major browser fully supports SVG -- they all only support parts of it. Even the partially supported features are not common across browsers.

SVG hasn't really materialized because it is not a fully supported standard feature in

SVG has been around for quite sometime. The first specifications were released in 2001, Every major browser except IE supports SVG out of the box. The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

This is all quite true. However, there was another big player that fucked SVG up for us all: Adobe. They made an SVG plugin, but promoted THEIR proprietary code for embedding it, so that even

It bugs me that when printing or taking a screenshot of a web page with graphics that were originally vector-based but had to be converted to PNG, the coarseness of the graphics look awful next to the crispness of the text.

Here's a quick list:1) The complete SVG standard is huge. While every modern browser "supports SVG", they really only support certain subsets, and these are not consistent between the different browsers.2) You need development tools for designers in order for it to take off. Since Adobe bought Macromedia (and thus push Flash like crack), few companies have the manpower/skill to create a dynamic (animation-friendly) design/development environment targeted at web *designers*. You need SVG to be adopted by graphic designers, not just programmers.3) Flash.4) Flash.5) Canvas is a much simpler and smaller standard, and it's much easier to implement. Browsers that integrate Canvas usually implement it in its entirety, and then they can place the "supports Canvas" sticker on their list of features. To do so with SVG would take too long and would require a lot more resources.

The path of least resistance is not SVG. It's a very promising standard, and programs like Inkscape have done wonders with it (and so has KDE), but in browser-land there are simpler solutions that are more widely supported.

The path of least resistance is not SVG. It's a very promising standard, and programs like Inkscape have done wonders with it (and so has KDE), but in browser-land there are simpler solutions that are more widely supported.

So are you trying to say that it's easier to get IE to implement canvas? Or are you trying to say that it's not worth implementing the rest of SVG in the browsers that support it?

Yes, SVG needs to be in tools that target graphics designers, like Illustrator and Inkscape. And I guess, by your logic, those apps need to support canvas too.

Canvas is a simple API for drawing to a space on a web page. That definitely fills some needs. SVG fills some needs too. There is overlap. There's also overlap between pla

I think it's more a matter of Flash being good enough for most web designers for that kind of content. The nice thing about flash, from the point of view of many web designers, is that it is consistently implemented across platforms; a flash animation will always look exactly the same in Internet Explorer (even IE6), Firefox, Safari, and whatever else supports the Flash plugin. It's possible to stream videos with Flash; it's not possible to stream videos with SV

A designer cannot create any required elements in a format that is not supported by the majority of the audience

I take a different approach. If I see that someone isn't using IE, I send them nice crisp SVG images. If they have IE, then I send them the larger and crappier looking PNG images. My hope is that enough people notice how they get pixelated and smeared images that take a long time to load, compared to people with a real browser who get nice images that download quickly.

SVG is a stateful 2D scenegraph API while WebGL is (mostly) stateless 3D API.
So are we going to see SVG obsolete a few years from now, when devs start coding their own scenegraph frameworks in javascript using WebGL? I personally am biased towards WebGL due to its Opengl ES 2.0 roots.

In the web development world, it can take quite a long time for something to go from being "useless" to "obsolete". Even with that wishful thinking that WebGL will be viable for this a few years from now, its unlikely all the tools and workflows that now happily play with SVG will move over instantly, and even less likely that the type of devs out there[and many of them] that still haven't moved over to common sense web workflows of the past decade like proper use of CSS are going to be motivated to use Web

If SVG doesn't have the things what Flash designers have and use, it will stay as underdog. It is same for WebGL.

Just think about how Flash gained its position today, it is like parallel anti universe to SVG. Also, do you think MS will include anything related to OpenGL on IE/Windows? Macromedia/Adobe really know who they deal with so they keep Flash tight, 1.4 MB thing, they even count numbers like 10-30 KB (H264 wasn't included for that reason).

I would argue that as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight (which is just browser-safe WPF) as their form of a vector graphics applet for their web browser, any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate. Silverlight is their attempt to build a Flash-alternative with a SVG programming framework, which is (to Microsoft) a "best" of both worlds. To the rest of us coming from the WinForms world, it's a so-so product that's really awkward to use. I known that MS is pushing Expression Blend as an alternative to Adobe CS3's UI, but really, why didn't they just integrate it into Visual Studio for native editing instead of all this back-and-forth multiwindow crap.

For example, SVG Shapes [w3.org] vs WPF Shapes [microsoft.com]. It's no accident that the syntax is almost exact. But why would Microsoft embrace SVG directly, with its Javascript code triggers, when they can go the Silverlight route with.Net triggers.. it's basic product bundling, to get you to use Microsoft's approach to everything.

as long as Microsoft continues to push Silverlight... any alternative approach within MS is going to stagnate

Yes and no. MS clearly have no strategic interest in encouraging SVG. But I doubt there's all that much overlap between the Silverlight and IE teams, and I'm sure that a lot of the IE guys are decent enough engineers to be embarrassed about their product's foot-dragging. So far, MS have been able to keep SVG off the mainstream Web by refusing to support it. If Google's SVG-on-Flash takes off, and th

Every other story about Google this week has been filled with responses about how evil they are, but we fall down on this one?!

This is Google pushing a vector format. Vectors, people! Do you not remember vector diagrams from college physics? Imagine the horror that Google could unleash on the public with this technology! Imagine the hours upon hours of boring lectures! Just... look at the bones!

It's sad everybody is thinking about SVG in the confines of a web browser. Why can we only get a standardized, powerful 2D vector animation API along with the limitations of HTTP and Javascript?

The SVG scene model is a perfect candidate for a windowing system (like X11) of the future, fully scalable, themable, supporting all kinds of transformations for fancy window managers and light on bandwidth.

But sadly everybody thinks about SVG in terms of webapps or displaying icons, as opposed to native applications

I'm not changing how I do things because Google promotes it. Stop acting like its the open revolution and people hate it just because they support Microsoft, because that has nothing to do with it. SVG and Silverlight have failed equally up to this point in terms of adoption and support.